‘This Land We Call Home’: A rare account of changing homes, faiths, identities and nation

What makes one choose to shift homes? A quick internet search will suggest prospects for something better, greater, or more. The variables are several: education, career, lifestyle, air quality, safety, proximity to loved ones, money. It seems that any voluntary migration, from A to B, is performed with some form of gain in sight; one sets sail when the promise of a better land awaits. In Nusrat F Jafri’s debut book This Land We Call Home, a family belonging to an outcaste tribe – the Bhantus – shifts homes in the hope to shed their caste. For them, the gain in sight is not an upgrade, but the only chance at a life of respect.

A trial by fire

The book – which, among other things, is a historical portrait of Jafri’s maternal ancestry – begins with a fire. A fire that had eaten up her great-grandparents’ house in Alwar, Rajasthan in the year 1880. Hardayal and Kalyani Singh, members of the Bhantu tribe at the time, had turned criminals in the eyes of the law when the British enacted the Criminal Tribes Act in 1871. Despite the Bhantus tracing their lineage to Rajputs from the army of Rana Pratap, they were reduced to a nomadic...

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